GOP turns up IRS rhetoric

Congressional Republicans are trying to re-kindle the IRS tea party targeting controversy just as the 2014 election season gears up — but some GOP strategists are warning them to tread cautiously.

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The eight-month-old scandal, which led President Barack Obama to push out the acting IRS chief, has been dormant for months: No hearings and no big breakthroughs have linked the White House to the agency’s mistreatment of conservative social welfare groups.

Yet now, Republicans are again revving up the partisan rhetoric. They’re decrying administrative efforts to “stifle conservative voices,” and questioning the FBI’s IRS probe because one investigator was found to be an Obama donor.

“Rather than reform the IRS and root out any hint of corruption or targeting of political opponents, [the Obama administration is] now proposing to codify it,” said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) on the Senate floor Thursday. “ [Obama] wants to use the IRS to drive conservatives right off the playing field.”

McConnell, who is facing a tough reelection in the Bluegrass state this fall, is just getting started on the IRS, his office said, warning of more speeches to come.

News that the IRS pulled right-leaning groups applying for tax exemptions for closer scrutiny dominated headlines over the summer, but eventually died down when Republicans were unable to link the snafu to the White House, or prove ill intent.

Now, talk of the scandal is resurfacing, among Republicans at least.

McConnell is one of several GOP voices accusing the White House of targeting conservatives by writing new IRS rules limiting the political activities of 501(c)(4) nonprofit groups that want tax exemptions — though the rules would apply to liberal groups as well as conservative ones.

Still, Ways and Means Chairman Dave Camp (R-Mich.) recently introduced legislation to stall the rule for a year, complaining that the White House was trying to stifle conservative speech.

Last week, House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) called on the media to be as diligent with the IRS scandal as it has been with the seemingly unrelated Gov. Chris Christie bridge escapade.

And this week, 2016 presidential hopeful Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) used hearing time to interrogate Attorney General Eric Holder about reports that one of several lawyers working on the FBI’s investigation, Barbara Bosserman, has donated more than $6,000 to Obama and Democrats.

On Thursday, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee tried to summon Bosserman to answer questions, a day after the Ways and Means committee announced it would interrogate the new IRS commissioner on the scandal next week, too — the first hearing on the IRS dust-up in months.

GOP strategists said Republicans are obviously capitalizing on an easy issue for the election season. Vilification of the IRS has always energized the base.

“The IRS represents everything base Republicans hate about government,” said Ford O’Connell, a GOP strategist for John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign. “If they want to take the Senate in 2014, they’ll have to jazz up the base in every way possible.”

The same strategists also said the GOP has every right to make the IRS scandal a central issue because there’s evidence of gross mismanagement.

“It probably has everything to do with the fact that it’s an election season, but that doesn’t mean the questions about the IRS overreach are not warranted,” said GOP consultant John Weaver.

But two GOP election advisers expressed concerns about the new Republican strategy of “investigating the investigator.”

“How ironic that in the name of trying to get the facts out about whether Americans were unfairly targeted by a federal agency for their political believes, elected Republicans would be targeting an FBI agent in the middle of doing [her] job for expressing [her] political beliefs,” said Steve Schmidt, a well-known GOP strategist.

Schmidt said Republicans are attempting to “prejudice” any FBI conclusions that show the White House had no direct involvement with the controversy before they’re released.

He called it “a bad strategy,” “unfair” and “pure opportunistic politics.”

When the scandal first erupted, Democrats briefly made a stink over the fact that the IRS watchdog who wrote the report on the matter, treasury inspector general Russell George, was a Republican donor — but their complaints never took.

Weaver said there is no reason to question the leadership of FBI Director James B. Comey, who is respected by both parties. He also said political leanings don’t necessarily make someone guilty.

“I wouldn’t question somebody’s motives or ethics based on something like that,” he said. “I don’t think that’s the right road to go down” with the IRS investigation.

O’Connell believes the GOP concern about Bosserman is legitimate, but he said Republicans could overplay the issue if they politicize the IRS scandal too much.

“If you drive the stake home too hard, obviously you can hurt yourself,” O’Connell said, pointing to Oversight Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), whose “trumpeting ‘IRS!’ like a college fight song turned some people off.”

Issa’s committee is believed to be leading the most aggressive investigation into the matter.

On Thursday, the Justice Department refused the panel’s summons of Bosserman because, as Holder told Cruz earlier this week, the department cannot comment on ongoing investigations.

“This is ‘gotcha politics’ at its finest,” O’Connell said of the summons, noting that the GOP probably knew they’d get such a response.

But a spokesman for Oversight Republicans said that it only shows politics have “infected” the FBI probe.

In the coming weeks, the Senate Finance Committee will release its much-awaited bipartisan findings on the controversy — the only congressional committee to work in relatively bipartisan fashion on the investigation. The results of those findings will, therefore, carry weight.

But Republicans aren’t waiting.

In addition to airing concerns about Bosserman, top Republican House investigator Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and Issa have accused the FBI of “stonewalling” the committee, promising to meet with them to update the House on the investigation, then cancelling the briefings when the panel followed up.

Then there’s the issue of a newly drafted IRS proposal to limit the political activities of social welfare groups.

McConnell called them a “thuggish attempt to shut down its critics” and said they “codify the same kind of intimidation and harassment of its political opponents that stunned a nation last year.”

“Democrats think 2014 is shaping up to be a tough year for them politically, so instead of trying to persuade the public that they’ve got the best answers to the problems we face, they try to shut everybody else out of the political process — they try to shut them up,” he said.

That’s misleading for a number of reasons, the primary one being that the news rules would actually “affect left-wing groups and right-wing groups equally,” said Eric Wang of the Center for Competitive Politics, which opposes the rules.

“Let’s dispel that notion: The rules themselves [would be] nonpartisan,” he said of recent Republican comments on the topic.

But these details don’t really matter in elections, experts said.

“Perception is reality in politics, not the actual reality,” O’Connell said.